Comment by PaulKeeble
1 month ago
I often wonder if my home NAS/Server would be better off put onto a rented box or a cloud server somewhere, especially since I now have 1gbit/s internet. Even now the 20TB of drive space and 6 Cores with 32GB on Hetzner with a dedicated is about twice the price of buying the hardware over a 5 year period. I suspect the hardware will actually last longer than that and its the same level of redundancy (RAID) on a rented dedicated so the backup is the same cost between the two.
Using cloud and box storage on Hetzner is more expensive than the dedicated server, 4x owning the hardware and paying the power bill. AWS and Azure are just nuts, >100x the price because they charge so much for storage even with hard drives. Contabo nor Netcup can do this, its too much storage for them.
Every time I look at this I come to the same basic conclusion, the overhead of renting someone else’s machine is quite high compared to the hardware and power cost and it would be a worse solution than having that performance on the local network for bandwidth and latency. The problem isn't so much the compute performance, that is relatively fairly priced, its the storage costs and data transfer that bites.
Not really what the article was necessarily about but cloud is sort of meant to be good for low end hardware but its actually kind of not, the storage costs are just too high even a Hetzner Storage box.
It really depends on your power costs. In certain parts of Europe, power is so expensive that Hetzner actually works out cheaper (despite them providing you the entire machine and datacenter-grade internet connection).
Trust me, even with 35 cent/kwh (Germany), its easy to make it work. Just do not buy enterprise hardware. People are obsessed with running racks full of often obsolete hardware, that is not designed around energy efficiency.
Here is a fun one ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1dqq3h8/my_12x_...
Dude is running 12x AMD 6600HS with a power draw between 300 a 400W. The compute alone is easily 3x of a equivalent Hetzner 48c server. We shall not mention the that inc 768GB of memory (people underestimate how much high capacity rdimms draw in power).
The main issue with Hetzner is, as long as you only use their base configuration servers, they are very competitive. The issue is, if you start to step a little bit out of line, the prices simply skyrocket. Try adding more storage to some servers, memory, or you need a higher interconnect between your servers (limited to 10Gbit).
Even basic consumer hardware comes with 2.5Gbit, yet, Hetzner is in the stone ages with 1Gbit. I remember the time when Hetzner introduced 1Gbit. Hetzner was innovation, and progression. But that has been slowly vanishing. Hetzner has been getting more and more lazy. You see the issue also with their cloud offerings storage. Look at Netcup, even Strato etc... They barely introduce anything new anymore, and when something comes its often less competitive or broken. The whole S3 costing Backblaze price levels and non-stop issues.
You can tell they are the only company that every pushed for consumer hardware hosting on mass scale, what made them a small monopoly in the market. And it shows if your a old customer, and know their history. Hey, do people remember the price increases for the auction hardware because of the Ukraine invasion. Do not worry folks, when the electricity prices go down, we will adjust them down. O, we are pre-war prices for almost 2 years. Where is that promised price drops? Hehehe ...
> Just do not buy enterprise hardware
But then you need to buy newer, more expensive hardware, which pushes your initial price up (divide by the amount of time you'll need to host the server to get the monthly equivalent, then add power/connectivity/maintenance and compare to Hetzner).
Btw generally the reason homelabbers flock to legacy enterprise hardware is that it generally gives you a good amount of compute for a cheap price, if you don't mind the increased power cost. This is actually fine as a lot of homelab usage is bursty and the machine can be powered off outside of those times.
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I think I’ve settled on both being the answer - Hetzner is affordable enough that I can have a full backup of my NAS (using ZFS snapshots and incremental backups), and as a bonus can host some services there instead of at home. My home network still has much lower latency and so is preferable for ie. my Lightroom library.